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Medicine

Submission + - Metabolically Engineered Plants Produce New Drugs (gizmag.com)

fergus07 writes: Scientists have been engineering new genes into plants for a number of years in an effort to expand on naturally occurring medicinal compounds. Now chemists at MIT have gone one step further, using an approach known as metabolic engineering to alter the series of reactions plants use to build new molecules, thereby enabling them to produce unnatural variants of their usual products.

Comment Re:Distributed search engines failed (Score 1) 378

It's ironic that Grub returns nothing but sites that want to sell me jerseys when I search for an NFL player, whereas the top Google links are always the player profile pages from NFL.com and other major sports sites, and the player's Wikipedia entry. Add to that the easy access to "news" for the player and there's little question which search engine is the more useful.

Google works because their ranking system works. If it stopped working well, they would lose market share very quickly.

The Internet

Korea Kicking People Offline With One Strike 176

An anonymous reader writes "While there's lots of talk of 'three strikes' laws in places like France, it may be worth looking over at South Korea, which put in place a strict new copyright law, required by a 'free trade' agreement with the US (which was the basis for ACTA). It went into effect in the middle of 2009, and now there's some data about how the program is going. What's most troubling is that the Copyright Commission appears to be using its powers to 'recommend' ISPs suspend user accounts based on just one strike, with no notice and no warning. The system lets the Commission make recommendations, but in well over 99% of the cases, the ISPs follow the recommendations, and they've never refused to suspend a user's account."
Media

AP Proposes ASCAP-Like Fees For the News 146

eldavojohn writes "Techdirt directed my attention to an article where the AP discussed pressure from new devices and mediums today giving them cause to create a clearinghouse for news — much like the music industry's ASCAP — to 'establish an enforcement and payment system.' You'll notice that the story I am linking to and quoting is an AP story ... would Slashdot then be required to pay these fees? We have seen DMCA take down notices and fee discussions before from the AP."
Graphics

Adobe Releases New 64-Bit Flash Plugin For Linux 240

TheDarkener writes "Adobe seems to have made an about face regarding their support for native 64-bit Linux support for Flash today, and released a new preview Flash plugin named 'Square.' This includes a native 64-bit version for Linux, which I have verified works on my Debian Lenny LTSP server by simply copying libflashplayer.so to /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins — with sound (which I was never able to figure out with running the 32-bit version with nspluginwrapper and pulseaudio)."
Government

Pentagon Aims To Buy Up Book 347

jamie writes "Operation Dark Heart, a book about the adventures and frustrations of an Army officer who served in Afghanistan, has ruffled some feathers at the Pentagon. From the article: 'The Defense Department is attempting to buy the entire first printing — 10,000 copies — of a memoir by a controversial former Defense Intelligence Agency officer so that the book can be destroyed, according to military and other sources."
Censorship

Assange Rape Case Reopened 529

eldavojohn writes "Wikileaks' Julian Assange had a warrant issued for his arrest in Sweden on the charges of rape. But it was withdrawn shortly thereafter. Now the case has been reopened to investigate 'molestation charges.' On top of that, a new site (parody?) called wikileakileaks.org has been launched by the chief editor of Gawker to give Wikileaks a taste of its own medicine. You can find links to details on the molestation charges there."
Science

Canon Unveils 120-Megapixel Camera Sensor 289

Barence writes "Canon claims to have developed a digital camera sensor with a staggering 120-megapixel resolution. The APS-H sensor — which is the same type that is used in Canon's professional EOS-1D cameras — boasts a ridiculous resolution of 13,280 x 9,184 pixels. The CMOS sensor is so densely packed with pixels that it can capture full HD video on just one-sixtieth of the total surface area. However, don't hold your breath waiting for this baby to arrive in a camera. Canon unveiled a 50-megapixel sensor in 2007, but that's not made it any further than the labs to date." It's probably not going too far out on a limb to say that the any-day-now rumored announcement of an update to the 1D won't include this chip, but such insane resolution opens up a lot of amazing possibilities, from cropping to cheap telephoto to medium and large format substitution. Maybe I should stop fantasizing about owning a full-frame 1D or 5D and redirect my lust towards 120 megapixels.

Comment Re:...And one generation behind on HTML5 (Score 2, Informative) 341

h264 isn't going to be a practical problem for the vast majority of users, since Firefox can just use a system codec (non-Windows-users would have to make sure they have one, of course).

As for JS speed, Mozilla are very ardent in their speed claims, so it's hard not to believe they have something to back it up. It's difficult for users and external testers to figure out exactly how fast they are, despite being open source, because the Moz team is pursuing several parallel tracks to increase JS speed. There's "fat-val", "tracer JIT" and "method JIT". Each is currently significantly faster than the "normal" versions, but there hasn't been any public testing on a build that combines all three.

Mozilla claim they'll be faster than everyone else and while they may be scuppered by new advances from Google and Opera, it seems reasonable that they will at least be faster at launch than where everyone else is now. That alone would ensure "next-generation JS performance".

Where they trail Chrome is in "use speed". Chrome starts and shuts down a lot faster -- and I think that's going to be a problem for Firefox moving forward (more than it already is).

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